In Geel, located around 40 kilometers east of the Belgian port city of Antwerp, on the dead-straight Amocolaan there is an approximately 115-hectar chemical park of the British oil company BP since 1967. In October 2011, JBF Global Europe BVBA – a company of the JBF group (India) specialized on plastics and packing material, began constructing a plant for the manufacture of PET chips. The plant is the largest of its kind in Europe with a daily production of 2 x 600 tons. It started operation in June 2014 and has been running in 24/7 operation since then.
The high quality PET produced in this plant is in particular used for the manufacture of bottles and packaging. For this plant, the East-Westphalian specialist for heat transfer oil plant heat 11 (www.heat11.com) delivered the heat supply for various consumers as well as two steam generators indirectly heated with thermal oil. The scope of supply included the basic and detail engineering, the delivery of the plant components and the assembly monitoring plus the commissioning at site. Furthermore the operating staff of the operator JBF received an extensive training.
The thermal oil heater system consists of three gas-fired heaters (type FH-T 18.000 vertical) with firing plants, stack and heat recovery units for the preheating of the combustion air. By the use of the heat recovery units the thermal efficiency of the boilers is above 90 %. Thus the thermal oil plant disposes of a capacity with which more than 2.500 single-family homes can be supplied with heat. The boiler dimensions are very large: They are 16 m high, their diameter is around 3.80 m. This ensures a heating capacity of around 18.000 kW per boiler, in total the entire heating capacity of the plant delivered by heat 11 amounts to around 54.000 kW.
Within secondary loops two steam generators indirectly heated with thermal oil provide the steam supply of the PET plant. They can produce around 4.000 kg of steam per hour each, the equivalent of around 2.600 kW per steam generator.
The requirements of JBF to the heating plant were enormous with regard to the efficiency and exhaust emission. Despite an efficiency of around 93 %, the very low limit values for the exhaust of nitrogen oxide are observed (80 mg NOX per NM3). Another peculiarity of this plant is the redundant design of the boiler plant. So a “flying change” between the plant parts is possible.
The plant has been running practically free of trouble since start-up. “We have recently received mail from Belgium. With a personal letter, the plant manager of JFB expressed his thanks for our work during the construction and commissioning phase. In addition, he noted that the thermal oil heaters as well as the steam generators have been working very satisfying since the commissioning of the plant.” says Dr. Dietmar Hunold, managing partner of heat 11.
Appreciation letter of JBF. Click to enlarge.
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